


the thunder and the laughter (the last thing they —)

by nagia



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Uncharted Fusion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-12
Updated: 2014-12-12
Packaged: 2018-03-01 03:11:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2757368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagia/pseuds/nagia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Average investigative journalist shot at 3 times per week" factoid actually just statistical error. Average investigative journalist shot at 0 times per week. Derek Hale, who's shot at over 10,000 times each day and wishes he lived in a cave, is an outlier and should not have been counted.</p><p>OR: That one where Deucalion is still a scary motherfucker, the Stilinskis retrieve antiquities, Derek is an investigative journalist, and they're all looking for a Mayan codex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the thunder and the laughter (the last thing they —)

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for gun violence, close-quarters combat, and contagious disease with symptoms similar to bubonic plague and gas gangrene. These events are unskippable, unavoidable, and depicted unflinchingly. If you feel you may be triggered by any of the above, please read with care or use a pre-reader.

_Day Six — the Gulf of Mexico_

The rattle of anti-aircraft guns hurts Derek's ears; the shrieking of the plane's sensors hurts them worse. The plane itself can't seem to maintain steady altitude; it rises a little and swoops back down, lifts and falls, tilts one way and then another, and Derek feels sick to his stomach. Beside him, Stiles shrugs into a parachute and adjusts the straps, mumbling imprecations about men who fire on seaplanes and on his father's seaplane, specifically, even as he moves on and checks his gun.

"Won't that be useless after it's been wet?" Derek nods at the gun.

"Let's hope we land in the canopy, just like we planned," Stiles says, his tone of voice bright, his mouth a smug curve, but his eyes and heartbeat are grim.

In front of them, in the cockpit, Stilinski snarls something and then says, "Jump if you're jumping, you two. It's getting too hot."

The plane jerks, shudders, does a choppy up-and-drop, and Derek's stomach rebels again.

It's Stiles who shoves the duffel bag with all their research into the cockpit, then swings the door shut. Derek hears furious cursing from the other side, the rasp of metal against metal, and then the heavy _chuk_ as the cockpit door is locked.

I might survive this, Derek thinks, even as Stiles leans in toward him, pale brown eyes on fire in dim light, and long fingers check the straps of Derek's parachute. Derek watches his hands move, numbly allows Stiles to strap a handgun to his thigh — fingers warm against the denim of his jeans, and Derek hates that layer between their skin, hates this plane, hates this story — and then watches as Stiles throws open the plane's cargo door.

"You ready?"

No.

Derek jumps anyway.

One-two-ohshitohshit _ohshit_ -three-can-he-survive-this-fall-four-five and _pull_ —

The parachute doesn't deploy.

* * *

_Day One — Coco Solo_

Derek was hoping for more time in the sun, more drinks with little umbrellas, and a lot less frustration when Peter told him he'd be chasing leads in Panama. Not that he'd ever really blow off his work to party, but investigative journalism is, believe it or not, not a twenty-four hour job. There should have been time. There could still be time; the crew he's keeping an eye on still take an inflatable boat from the beach out to the dredging ship every morning, and come back every night. And Derek's nearly got their head of security charmed, he's sure of it.

They'll be here a while yet, and Derek will get the scoop.

He expected the salt-sand scent of the sea. He just didn't count on the intense smell of fish and the tangy-oily medicine smell of his own sunscreen, or how frustrating the camera Peter sent south with him can be. Laura would have been more competent with it, but Peter had said that Laura would attract too much attention. Which is probably true; Laura's even less subtle than Derek.

But hey, at least he got the ridiculously blue sunlit waters right.

He's in a bar on the side of beach, looking out at the sea and watching the inflatable carrying the head of security and the expedition's brain trust, when he sees a young man in a red-and-black wetsuit surface. Derek only lets himself look for a minute before he sees the security team drag the boat ashore. He'd expect a pair of archaeologists to wear khaki, but they're in denim cutoff shorts and tank tops, and they're both deeply tanned.

Stilinski — the crew's head of security — drops his chin toward his chest, shaking his head as he chuckles, pointing at the guy in the wetsuit. The ocean's rolling grumble drowns out the actual conversation, but Derek thinks he gets the gist. The kid throws his head back and laughs with his whole body. After a minute, Stilinski gestures, and the wetsuited guy approaches. Laughter. Handshakes. A one-armed hug and a back-slap. Apparently the expedition is familiar with the tourists around here? Derek makes a mental note.

After that, Stilinski, the surfer, and the crew all start strolling toward the bar. Derek looks up at the ridiculous fake straw roof, at the wall behind the actual bartop, with its shitty selection of bad local beers and the more tolerable selection of spirits. He takes another sip off his Balboa and tries to play casual.

Stilinski and the archaeologists make their way to the beachside bar, with the kid drifting a ways behind. Stilinski pulls up a stool right next to Derek. His eyes are green, his face tanned and lined from the sun, and he manages to fold easy-going jocularity in with an aura of authority. Derek likes his heartbeat, a rolling rhythm steady as a marching cadence.

"Hale," Stilinski says, eyes crinkled and glinting in a hidden smile. Then he turns to the bartender and says, "Un Panama, por favor."

"Oyé, Stilinski," one of the archeologists says, his accent something curling and angular, but with an American flatness. Like a native English-speaker who spends a lot of time around Columbians. "Y qué para nos?"

Stilinski gives a wry smile and says in Spanish, "I'm sorry, I thought you could ask for yourselves. _Three_ Panamas, please." He slides a look at Derek's godawful Balboa and says, tone desert-dry even in a second language, "And make that one more."

"Still working on the Balboa," Derek grunts in English.

Stilinski just shakes his head. "Stick to the Panama, son. Hale, did I ever introduce you to the team?"

His chance! Derek slides the Balboa away and looks over at the two archaeologists. The man looks — to Derek — some indistinct flavor of Latino, if he's judging right by the deep olive brown of his skin and his utter ease with Spanish. He has an uneven jaw and floppy dark curls. The other, a woman, has bone-straight black hair that she's pushed behind a bandana. She's only a little paler than uneven jaw guy, with skin that has a slightly more golden tone.

"No, you never have," he says, and really hopes the archaeologists speak English.

The male archaeologist thrusts a hand forward and says, "Scott McCall."

Derek shakes his hand, a little numb because that was really not a name he was expecting, and says, "Derek Hale."

"Journalist," McCall says, with a smile that's all teeth. His nostrils flare for a moment, and Derek takes a deep breath in turn. Another werewolf; no wonder he seems not to like Derek.

The woman punches McCall in the shoulder and says, "Play nice, Scotty. I'm Kira Yukimura. I've heard of your program, but I've never seen any of your work."

Derek just smiles, politely. His instinct is to say, 'You're probably not missing much,' because he always sends at least an hour and a half of footage, and Peter always trims it down to easily-digested seven minute segments. But he can't quite bring himself to say it, if only because McCall is looking at him like he's a grenade with the pin pulled out.

Something is wrong here. Derek _knows_ something is wrong here. He should ask questions. Where did they get their degrees? What are their specialties? He opens his mouth to ask — 

The bartender chooses that moment to open four bottles of Panama and place them in front of his customers. The bottles glint green in the light, and Derek breathes in. He's pretty sure he likes the smell of the Balboa better, but coffee and wine have taught him that drink smells aren't _always_ consistent with their tastes.

The wetsuited kid drops onto the stool on Derek's other side and drums his fingers on the bar. When the bartender looks at him and raises an eyebrow, he says, "Tomaré lo que tiene," and points to Derek.

The bartender plunks a beer down in front of the kid and then vanishes to the other side of the bar. Derek doesn't blame him.

"Hale," Stilinski says, long-suffering. "That's my son, Stiles. And he won't be drinking if he thinks he's going to get back into the water. Stiles, that's Derek Hale."

"Nah, Dad," Stiles says, his mouth wide and his lips pink around the words. His heartbeat is rabbit-fast, and he smells of salt and fish and, strangely, gunpowder. Also very faintly of piss and very strongly of rubber, but that's not really unusual for surfers. "I'm done for the day."

"Good," Stilinski says. "You'll be covering us tomorrow."

"Aw, come on, I thought I was off-duty two days. You promised I'd get at least two days to surf while we were down here." 

Jesus, is this kid old enough to drink? His tanned face is all freckles and moles, and Derek isn't sure if he wants to smack him in the back of the head or drag him back to his shitty motel.

"Yeah, well, we're going to have an extra person to account for tomorrow, so I'll need an extra hand on deck." There's no arguing with that tone.

McCall asks anyway: "What do you mean extra person? I didn't clear any — Kira, did you clear any...?"

Kira shakes her head.

" _I_ cleared it," Stilinski says, and crosses his arms as he nods at Derek. "Trust me, you want a journalist looking at your dig. He's been angling for it for days, and the exposure will be good for your funding."

Derek feels the tips of his ears turn red. Yeah, he's more subtle than Laura, but he's obviously not subtle _enough_. On the other hand, tomorrow, he'll ask every question he can come up with. He finally has what he wants. 

Well, half of what he wants. He turns his head to look at Stiles, catches a glint in amber-brown eyes and a smirk that does nothing to make his mouth look less like it belongs in porn.

* * *

_Day Two — Coco Solo_

Why the hell did he want on the ship? 

Derek ducks down behind the dredging equipment, thick, sturdy metal, and listens to bullets zing off it, listens to the report of handguns that surely must carry for miles out on the water. Each blast is like someone took a fist and smacked his ears, like someone cracked a whip right next to his head, and even though he knows the bullets probably won't hurt him much, he flinches at what the guns do to his senses.

One of the security guys goes down. It's not Stilinski or his surfer-pornstar son, but still, the guy was nominally on Derek's side. Derek watches the man's gun fall from limp fingers and skitter across the boat. It skitters all the way within his reach, but then somebody fires again, and a big wave hits the ship — making everything tilt for a second — and the gun slides over the side.

It's not like he's ever used a gun before. It's not like it'd do him any good. But the thought of maybe having had a weapon that wouldn't compromise what he is and then _losing_ it, because he didn't dare grab it — 

The panic's so strong that his face burns with the shift. He has to focus for several moments on controlling himself, on keeping it together. Staying human.

One of the Stilinskis — Stiles, from the seasalt-and-guns smell rather than an Aqua Velva-and-guns smell — crouches near him. He's shouting something, but Derek's ears are so full of gunfire and creaking metal and angry ocean that he can't understand. Then Stiles waves a handgun under his nose, and Derek tries to focus on Stiles's heartbeat. It lets him hear the words:

"Hey! Hey! Listen, if I give you this, can you use it?"

"I don't know," Derek shouts back. "I've never —"

Stiles's eyes widen, and then he tugs on Derek, pulling them flush together. Somebody fires. There's a horrible, tin plinking as bullets hit the dredging equipment. Over the gunfire, over the ocean, up in the air above them, Derek hears a cable fray with a strange metal ringing noise. He pushes Stiles down to the ship's deck, pins Stiles's wrist so he hopefully won't jerk and accidentally fire at him.

The cable snaps. Derek hears its hiss, its groan, and then it whistles through the air, straight for them.

It collides with his back. He feels every inch of skin split as the metal digs into him, feels parts of the cut reknit and re-open as gravity and the rolling waves and the cable scrawl crazy patterns on his skin, two or three inches deep.

Pieces of equipment, pieces of whatever the crew pulled out of the water, fall to the deck around them. Metal strikes metal with a ringing sound that booms in his eardrums and reverberates around his skull, makes his teeth buzz. Derek stays on top of Stiles, keeps his head down, lets splinter-shards of deck and salvage and rig scrape at his arms.

"Hey," Stiles is saying, "holy shit, you didn't have to do that, oh god. We'll get you to some first aid. A hospital. Come on. I'll get you off this deathtrap, I promise."

"'m fine," Derek says, clenching his teeth and trying to remember what human feels like.

"That's the shock talking, you asshole," Stiles says, heart speeding from agitation to outright panic, fear spiking in his scent as he looks over Derek's shoulder. "Now let the hell go of my wrist — let go, let go, I've gotta — we're gonna die — "

Stilinski's marching beat heart approaches. He fires three times. Two bodies thump to the deck, and Derek lets go of Stiles's wrist.

"Hale. Stiles. We've got to get moving," Stilinski says. "Hale, can you stand?"

"He's gonna bleed out," Stiles says in a rush. "Dad, he took a snapped cable to the back for me. What if it got his spine? It probably got his spine, we're gonna have to carry —"

Derek pushes himself to his feet, then leans down and hauls Stiles up with him.

"Said 'm fine," he grunts. "Stilinski, you got a way off this scrap heap?"

"Scott and Kira are prepping the inflatable," Stilinski says. "Come on. Stiles, can you take point?"

"'course," Stiles says. He twitches his fingers and the magazine slides half out of his gun. Derek watches long, delicate fingers grip the magazine, thumb moving slowly as he counts.

"Really, kid?" Stilinski arches his eyebrows. "You forget to keep track of your shots?"

"I just watched a guy get his back torn open!" But then Stiles jams the magazine back in and pulls the slide. He leads the way out, stepping as lightly over debris and dodging smoke as easily as Derek could. Stilinski brings up the rear.

Derek tunes out the ocean swell, the crackle of flames, and listens closely for heartbeats not belonging to Stiles or Stilinski. He hears the first one when they're midway across the ship. The heartbeat is just around the corner. Derek holds his hand out for Stilinski and grabs Stiles's shoulder.

When Stiles looks back, Derek just holds up one finger and points.

Stiles's expression turns grim. He pulls on his gun, probably thumbing back the hammer, plasters himself to the wall, and half-turns the corner. Derek hears two heartbeats speed up, and then a gun fires. Stiles turns back to them and nods.

"Thanks for the warning. How'd you know he was there?"

"Good hearing," Derek replies. His back is no longer oozing, he's pretty sure, but the healing flesh has begun to itch. Probably all the smoke around, or maybe his own sweat. Or maybe he has fibers from his shirt stuck in the cuts.

Stiles just looks at him for a minute before he shakes his head. "Come on."

Derek hears two other men before they meet them, and Stiles takes them out quickly and quietly both times. He gives Derek wondering looks, but he doesn't say anything about it. Derek's grateful for that.

They find McCall and Kira kneeling by the inflatable boat. They have it inflated; Kira is busy storing supplies and documents — packed in water-tight bags — while McCall fights with the boat's motor.

"Single most ghetto escape of my life," Stiles says. "Kira, any decent ranged guns? I'm not asking for a Dragunov, here."

Kira grins at Stiles from over her shoulder and holds up — Derek doesn't know guns. It looks kind of like an AK-47 to him, but it looks like it has two barrels, and the second is thinner, longer.

"The right arm of the Free World," Stiles says, running his fingers all over the gun. He settles its butt against his shoulder and smiles, and there's something complicated about the glint in his eyes.

McCall gets the motor started. "C'mon, Stiles, Sheriff. Time to go."

Stilinski thumps a hand onto the back of Derek's neck. Derek knows it probably looks like the only safe place to touch him, but he can't help the cringing, instinctual response to being grabbed by the scruff.

"Come on if you're coming, Hale," Stilinski says.

Derek clambers into the boat, staggers until he's sitting by Stiles.

Stiles just grins up at him and says, "Oh, good. You can pass me magazines."

* * *

Derek doesn't end up passing Stiles ammunition. Kira shows him how to fill magazines with cartridges, and Derek spends most of the ride alternately loading magazines and checking over the back of the boat, looking and listening for pursuit. There's nothing, even as something on the ship explodes — that sound, too, must carry for miles; it gives Derek a hollow-brained, endless headache, as if someone rang his skull like an alarm bell — and the ship begins to sink.

"Jesus," McCall says. "Kira —"

"I told you I got all the life rafts," Kira replies, totally calm.

Stiles just shakes his head and laughs. "You sure know how to pick 'em, Scotty."

"Yeah, well, after this, we're headed back to California," Kira says. "I don't _blame_ you for wanting the Yum Kaax Codex, but this has gotten way too dangerous."

"Kira, we can't stop! What if it has a cure —"

It all makes sense, now. Archaeologists who didn't introduce themselves as doctors, who didn't list their specialties. An archaeologist who _didn't_ want a journalist near his dig, despite the interest and grant money Derek's coverage could dredge up. The small crew, the way the head of security seemed to be calling the shots. The fucking armory Kira and Stiles hauled up out of nowhere.

"You're not archaeologists," Derek says. "This wasn't a sanctioned dig."

"Uh-huh," McCall snaps. "You gonna tell me you're here on a real story, or are you looking for the Yum Kaax Codex for _personal_ reasons?"

"Less personal than yours! I was going to make sure everybody knew it had been found, so it couldn't disappear into some hunter's private collection."

"Scott," Stilinski says. "Go back to your clinic. Your mother would never forgive me if I let you throw yourself into this kind of trouble. If we find the codex, we'll make sure it gets translated, make sure you get hold of whatever it talks about, if it's relevant." Stilinski's eyes drift to Derek, every bit as canny as his son's.

 _What do you know?_ Stilinski is wondering. _What do you think you know?_

But Derek doesn't say. He gets the impression everyone on this boat knows about McCall, but he's made it a point never to out another werewolf, in hopes they'll respect his privacy in return.

Kira leans forward, her eyes lighting up as she smiles. She doesn't smell quite human, and the sunlight sparkles off the sea into some sort of glow around her. She says, mischievous, "Still hung up on Melissa, Sheriff?"

"Trust me, we don't want to know," Stiles says, never ceasing his scan for enemies behind them. "Kira, just — just keep him in one piece on the ride back, okay? Even if we split up, I can't promise there won't be any pursuit." 

"You got it, Stiles." Kira's smile widens as she begins picking through the weaponry in the floor of the inflatable. She takes mostly knives, but she does tuck a handgun — a very small one — into a shoulder holster. She looks over at McCall, and her face softens with fondness. "You didn't even have to ask."

"You two are so _gross_ ," Stiles complains.

McCall's gaze fixes past Derek's shoulder, on the shoreline. "Almost to shore," he says. "Stiles, Sheriff, take care of yourselves." He levels a finger at Derek. "And don't trust him. He's a werewolf."

Fucking _seriously_?

"I'm a journalist first," Derek growls. "If the Yum Kaax Codex is real, the world has a right to know." 

It's not like ancient Mayan religious texts about the god of agriculture and the goddess of the moon are going to convince anybody that werewolves are real, and having it translated publically will only make it harder for hunters to steal it, like they've stolen so much else from the wolves in the world.

Stilinski says, calm and firm, "We'll deal with all that _later_. For now, Scott, take us ashore."

* * *

Derek and Scott drag the boat ashore, sloshing through knee-deep water and being smacked by waves the entire time. Derek's feet slip in the sand, his knees nudged out from beneath him by the insistent ocean. Meanwhile, Stiles and Kira pull out the weapons that, apparently, haven't made the cut for whatever firefights await them. They stow them away in a big black duffel bag while Stilinski looks up and down the beach.

They all walk away from the boat together, Scott and Kira clinging to each other. Stiles leans in close and slings his arm over Derek's neck and shoulders. Which — he doesn't think so, no. No matter what he wants to do to — he shouldn't — he has to — they're not fucking, they're not even friends, and if McCall gets his way, they never will be.

Derek starts shoving at Stiles. Naturally, the kid's a slippery little shit, eeling around and putting his arm back right where he wants it. 

"Shirt off," Stiles says.

"What." Derek looks over at Stiles, almost too tired to glare. 

"Jeez, put the angry death eyes away and relax your eyebrows. Your shirt's shredded and blood-stained. Lose it, and you'll look like a dumb gringo who wants to turn into a lobster. Keep it, and people will try to get us to drag you to a hospital."

Derek pushes Stiles away and peels himself out of the remaining scraps of his shirt. He takes a reflexive deep breath in, notes the sweat-musk scent of arousal from Stiles. He chances a quick look at McCall, whose nostrils are flared again. McCall frowns at Stiles, like he's done something particularly heinous.

Kira, on the other hand, looks over at Derek, before back to Stiles with arched brows.

"Well, I do like to eat some eye candy right after people try to kill me," Stiles says as he sidles in and presses close to Derek. Derek considers allowing it this time. "A dedicated reward system keeps me from deciding the antiquities business is too dangerous and buying a private island."

"You mean the money's not a good enough reward?" Stilinski asks, gruff.

But then the beach gives way to concrete, and they've hit the streets. Stiles stops, and McCall stops, too. There's a pause. McCall bites his lip and stares forlornly at Stiles and Stilinski, looking for all the world like an earnestly concerned puppy. Kira shifts on her feet, her gaze darting to Stilinski, as well.

"You packed light like I told you?" Stilinski asks. At Kira's nod, he says, "Don't go back to your hotel. Just head straight to the airport — stay in the light as much as you can. I'll make some calls; there should be a plane for you."

McCall reaches out for Stiles, pulling him into a one armed hug that turns into McCall rubbing his faintly stubbled cheek over Stiles's smooth one, whuffing breaths over Stiles's throat as he splays one hand along Stiles's back. To a non-wolf, it probably looks sexual, but Derek sees McCall's eyes glow gold as he stares at Derek over Stiles's shoulder.

 _Mine_ , McCall is saying. _He's in my pack, and you can't have him, and if you hurt him, I won't stop until I've torn your throat out._

Bitten wolves. So at the mercy of instincts they weren't raised with and don't entirely understand. Derek thinks he might be starting to see why McCall hopes the Yum Kaax Codex has a cure.

Derek crosses his arms over his chest and arches his brow, just to make sure every ounce of his judgment shows on his face as he says, "Might as well piss on him, too. Just to be sure."

McCall frowns. Stilinski snorts, amused, while Kira giggles. Stiles just looks over his shoulder and winks. He understands exactly what McCall's doing, Derek realizes, and is letting McCall go right ahead. For some reason that thought churns in his gut.

"Alright, boys," Stilinski says, wading forward to gently grasp both of them by the scruffs of their necks and peel them apart. Stilinski rests a large, rough hand on McCall's shoulder and says, "Take care of yourself, and tell your mother I said —"

McCall just grins cheekily and says, "I'll pick her up some flowers for you."

"Take care of yourselves," Kira says. She winks in Derek's direction, before threading her fingers through McCall's and gently tugging him away. To his credit, McCall never stops looking back until they've vanished from view. Beside him, Stiles watches them go, thrumming with tension. Some impulsive part of Derek — a part that really needs to shut up — wants to do something to make that tension go away. 

The Sheriff digs a phone out of his pocket, slides his thumb across the screen to wake it up.

* * *

Derek's packed up plenty of motel rooms in a hurry. He and Laura have never done it with nearly the efficiency that the Stilinskis manage. Then again, he's never done it knowing he was on a countdown to being shot at. Today, he can't forget; Stiles and Stilinski have positioned themselves so that one can see the door, and the other can see the window. Both have guns and rabbit-fast heartbeats.

His hands shake lightly as he grabs his last bag.

"Let's go," he says.

Stilinski claps him on the shoulder, while Stiles surveys the room. At Stiles's nod, Stilinski opens the door and heads out first, hand on his shoulder holster, and then grabs Derek by the shoulder-strap of his duffel and hauls him out. Derek lets him, lets the sharp jerk carry him at the pace Stilinski wants, and Stiles backs out of the room after them.

They stick to public streets — crowded ones — as they make their way to the airport.

Now's as good a time as any. Derek asks, "Why are we leaving Panama?"

"Too hot, for one," Stilinski grunts.

Stiles is quiet for a moment, before he adds, "For another, the Codex wasn't on the _Luna Soñolienta_. Records on the _Luna_ show it might have been on a ship that left from the Yucatán, the _Hijo De Prometeo_ , and something about a temple for Ixchel."

"What?" _Son Of Prometheus_? Temple for Ixchel? Wouldn't the Franciscan missionaries torn it down in the sixteen hundreds?

"Okay, you know how the Spanish Catholics pulled the same crap on the Mayans that the Roman Catholics pulled on the Celts, right? Only worse, because they deliberately brought shit like smallpox." Stiles actually turns and walks backward in the street as he begins to explain this, his eyes alight and his hands darting through the air like pale koi. "Well, one of the things they did — and there's a lot; we only _pretend_ that the Mayans just, like, poof, disappeared, okay? — was steal all their books. A lot of them they burned, but some of them, they were curious enough about that —"

" — that they put them on ships to take them back to Spain, only they were damaged by the ocean, or by improper storage, and there are only four intact codices. I _know_ all that, Stiles. But why did the Yum Kaax Codex escape Bishop De Landa's purge, and where are we going next?"

Stiles shrugs. "Nobody's sure on that. It's only ever been a rumor that the Yum Kaax Codex _did_ survive."

"Stiles," Derek says, grinding his teeth.

"Won't tell you where we're going 'til we're on the plane. It's a solid lead. That's all you need to worry about."

* * *

Calling what the Stilinskis use for international transport a 'plane' would be generous. 'Seaplane' might be more specific, but still dangerously optimistic. It might once have been cheerful white and yellow; now it's a brittle-looking dingry gray and something vaguely butter-colored, if the butter was sun-bleached and had been crapped on a lot by birds.

Seagulls clearly hate that thing. Derek takes one look at it — doesn't even bother breathing in; he wants nothing to do with even the smell of that obvious deathtrap — and hates it, too.

Stiles opens the door to what Derek assumes is the cargo bay and climbs in. Derek follows, and Stilinski is the last one in. He slams the cargo bay door closed and makes his way through the plane, toward the nose.

"So where are we going?" Derek demands the minute they're all near the nose.

"Campeche," Stiles says. "Some of the records I read made it look like the Codex never actually made it to the _Hijo_. Or maybe the _Hijo_ didn't go to Spain. I'm better with sixteenth century Russian than sixteenth century Spanish."

"But not all the records, right? And then why did you —"

"To throw off anybody who was listening." Stiles grins at him. "You're really not good at this subterfuge thing, are you?"

Derek doesn't get the chance to reply. Stilinski makes his way past them, into the cockpit. He leaves the cockpit door open, and Stiles stands to follow. Derek leans over to watch them flip switches and push buttons.

"We're clear," Stiles says, after checking a gauge three times.

* * *

Campeche turns out to be a pleasant, if not really rich-looking, seaside town. Derek has no idea what drives its economy; considering the sea, he'd guess fishing. Almost certainly not tourism. He sees a variety of boats in the water, looking deceptively close to shore, all brightly colored and bobbing up and down like corks. Outside the town, he sees densely wooded plains, a few hills, some sort of pale building that looks crumbled halfway to gone.

The plane circles the town, then hits the water a mile or so out from the harbor. Derek swears he hears every bolt and metal panel rattle at the impact.

The Sheriff cuts the plane's engine and gets on the radio, chatting amiably in Spanish and then — strangely enough — something that sounds like Polish, or something else Slavic. His heartbeat is as peaceful as the sound of waves slapping against the outside of the plane. Even Stiles seems vaguely relaxed, calm enough to leave the cockpit and sit next to Derek.

Stiles leans back and rests his head against the wall. "Scott and I used to come down here. You know, when we should have been going to high school. This used to be the most important port in the Yucatán."

Derek just raises an eyebrow. So this tiny town used to be important, and now it's apparently been forgotten by the rest of the world. How is that in any way relevant to the search for the Yum Kaax Codex?

"Important ports," Stiles says, "dealt with pirates. And to escape pirates, important people had secret passages."

"You're kidding," Derek says, flatly.

"Nope. I mean, not many people have found 'em, but there were seriously secret passages. And some of those secret passages lead to the Mission of Saint Francis and Saint Anthony." Stiles points vaguely inland. "It's just outside Campeche."

Derek thinks back to the pale, crumbling building. "That heap of rubble outside town? Are you sure those passages aren't _collapsed_?" Like half the Mission itself?

"At least one of them wasn't a few years ago. Scott and I were just fucking around. Never thought it'd be linked to the Codex." Stiles grins, a little rueful and a lot fond. They must be good memories.

Derek's memories of the past ten years mostly involve him or Laura getting kicked out of places for asking too many questions. He's no longer welcome in Roswell, New Mexico; Hilo, Hawai'i; or Derry, Maine. Laura's been politely asked not to return the entire state of Oregon and less politely informed that she's unwanted in Mozambique. And they neither of them go to California if they can help it, for more personal reasons.

Stilinski's voice cuts off. Derek looks up as his footsteps sound, his calm, steady heartbeat drawing closer.

"Parrish is going to let us use his private hangar," Stilinski says. "Stiles, I need you with me."

* * *

They manage to get the seaplane into a private hangar on the waterfront. Derek didn't expect it to make it that far — and the plane itself makes engine noises that remind him of a dying goose as they make their way. Still, the seaplane doesn't die, and neither Stilinski nor Stiles seem surprised by this.

A tallish man, with the kind of ageless face that could mean he's anywhere from thirties to fifties, with pale hair and green eyes, stands with his hands on his hip. He smiles at Stilinski, and gives Stiles an amused glance. Stiles returns it, though his expression quickly becomes a smirk, and Derek has the horrible suspicion that either they're related or they're involved. 

Derek takes a breath in through his nose, but he only picks up the typical scents of the ocean — salt, dead fish, garbage, seagulls — mixed in with sweaty humans, kerosene, and antifreeze. 

"Parrish," Stilinski says, face breaking into a grin. They shake hands, and Stilinski claps Parrish on the back. "Didn't think we'd get a chance to see you."

Parrish's smile drops. "Listen to me. Deucalion's in town."

"That's not possible," Stiles snaps, striding forward. "We're the only ones with the records from the _Luna Soñolienta_."

"Apparently, you're not. Or there was some other trail, or he was keeping an eye on that plane." Parrish shakes his head. "I'm sorry, but you're going to have to take some precautions while you're here."

Stilinski looks from Parrish to Stiles and sighs. "Alright. Two locations. One primary, one used for housing our notes. Parrish, would you mind —"

"I can hold onto your notes," Parrish says.

* * *

The motel the Stilinskis choose to hole up in is actually surprisingly nice, on Derek's sliding scale of seedy motels. He doesn't even have to grade it on the sliding scale of seedy _third world_ motels — San Francisco de Campeche is a small town, yes, and largely ignored. But it's small in a sleepy, salt-smelling, almost _kind_ way. The motel is only a few blocks away from the waterfront. It's a two-story building, mostly covered in stucco, and the wooden stairs and railings are slick and smell salty, with an undercurrent of rot's sugary bite.

They only rent one room. Derek wants to object, but it makes too much sense. He's just not going to be the one sleeping on the floor — he can smell damn near everything that's ever touched the filthy carpet. The beds, at least, smell mostly of sweat and come, and all of that has aged. The smell lingers, unpleasant, but it's not about to infect him with something.

Stilinski hits the bathroom first. Stiles is next. 

By the time Derek gets a chance, the bathroom smells strongly of Aqua Velva and stronger of the motel's crappy bar soap. The shower runs on a simple pull chain; when Derek tugs it, the showerhead spits a hissing, rusty trickle, all of it cold. 

He stands under the freezing spray and soaps up, too exhausted to care. He scrubs at his back, lets water that smells of the ocean — despite being filtered — pour over the healed flesh. He traces his nails at the tiny fibers that have been knitted in with his skin, digs claws in until he's bloody, pulls out threads from his shirt and flecks of the ship.

The water runs pink at first, then yellow as the bleeding slows. Derek doesn't step out of the shower until the water runs unstained by his blood and his back feels freshly healed.

The bathroom mirror is cracked. Derek looks in it, eyes the stubble yesterday's five o'clock shadow has turned into, and decides he cares about that even less than he did the cold water.

He returns to the room — takes slow, quiet steps through the darkened hall and more than half wishes that this kind of motel had more than two bathrooms to a floor — to find Stiles sitting cross-legged on the bed by the window with an open journal on his lap. Stilinski took the bed near the door, his heartbeat and breathing slower than usual as he nears sleep.

Derek can't help but notice that Stilinski's hung his holster from the bedframe and that Stiles has a handgun on the nightstand next to him. Guns are useless to him, but he's starting to feel like maybe he's not paranoid enough.

"No," Derek tells Stiles. "You're taking the carpet."

"Well," Stiles replies, impish and smug at once, "we could share."

Stilinski makes a sharp, half-choked noise. Derek turns just in time to catch the pillow the older man has half-heartedly thrown.

"For god's sake keep it down," Stilinski mutters. "There are things your old man just doesn't need to hear, Stiles."

Derek throws the pillow back, then sighs and shoves at Stiles. Stiles is already mostly on the window side of the bed, so it's a fairly simple matter to make room for himself. He turns his back to Stiles, then, just to see if he'll get a reaction — and also because this has been one of the longest days of his life — turns out the bedside light.

Rather than keep working in the journal, Stiles reaches over and flicks off the light on the other bedside table.

* * *

_Day Three — San Francisco de Campeche_

Derek wakes every couple of hours, because either Stilinski or Stiles wakes every couple of hours. They startle awake, reach automatically for their weapons — he hears the scrabble of hands over metal when Stiles reaches for the nightstand, and is easily able to see Stilinski check his holster — and then go back to sleep. 

He goes back to sleep with surprising ease each time. He'd never really expected to be so at ease, in a room with a pair of armed humans. But between Stilinski's steady, forward march heartbeat and Stiles's soft, even breaths, the day-bright, muted night lulls him down.

He's alert and rested when Stiles rolls out of bed around seven. Derek assumes it's seven; the sun washes the room gold, with bare tinges of pink to the sky.

Stiles returns half an hour later, smells of soap and deodorant and coffee and is carrying a paper sack. Cups of liquid thunk down on the motel room's dresser.

Stilinski rises next, pads down the hall and is back in ten, wearing fresh clothes and smelling of soap and his aftershave.

Derek, no fool, grabs a cup of coffee and eats one of the pastries from the bag before he showers.

When he heads back to the room, both Stilinski and Stiles are already dressed, with their guns presumably holstered and concealed. Stilinski is reading some sort of paper, though it's only a single wide sheet, while Stiles flips through pages of his journal, worrying at his lips with his teeth.

Derek pulls on a fresh tee-shirt and goes digging through his things for his cell phone. Two missed texts from Peter, both variations on 'where are you and where is my footage.' He shoots a quick note back that a lead has taken him to Mexico.

"Next up, we're going to get some gear from Parrish," Stiles says, while Stilinski keeps on with his newsletter, "and then we're going to charm our way into one of the older mansions in town. Then we're going to take the secret tunnels to the Mission, see if there's a way to get into something hidden in there."

What a brilliant plan, Derek thinks. Why is he involved with these clowns again?

"And what's your role in this?" He asks Stilinski.

Stilinski looks up from the page — which looks it's written in either Greek or Cyrillic, because of _course_ it is, and Derek doesn't want to consider just what the hell it's for — and says, "Well, I'm not with you. I'll be playing back-up in case that little monkey over there gets stuck in something."

Stiles rolls his eyes. "You're never gonna let me live Tibet down, are you?"

"You damn near passed out in that urn," Stilinski says. "I had to pull you out ankles first."

Derek closes his eyes and regrets the moment he joined up with these _master thieves_. Though they did get the job done in Panama, at least, and they clearly have connections and some idea of what they're doing.

Still, he has no idea how, exactly, they get anything done.

* * *

The answer, apparently, is charm, brilliant smiles, and a lot of dumb luck. Derek spares a moment to wonder if maybe they sacrifice goats to an elder god, when Stiles talks his way into an old mansion.

Then again, Stiles doesn't have to do much talking. He stashes the gear they take from Parrish — which covers everything from rope to flashlights to a small first aid kit — in a backpack, then buys tropical fruit from several street vendors, which he arranges in a cardboard box. They walk straight up to the front door, utterly ignoring several men in white linen suits with wires connected to their ears, and Stiles knocks.

A housekeeper answers, looking tiredly between Derek and Stiles, and then says, "Stilinski? _Monito?_ "

Stiles gives her a sunny smile. "That's me. Is Josefina here?"

"I'll go get her."

The instant the housekeeper closes the door, Derek turns to Stiles and asks, "Little monkey?"

Stiles shrugs. "I climb all over things. Have ever since I was a —"

A woman with dark skin and graying red-brown hair throws open the mansion's front door and rushes out, her arms spread wide. " _Monito!_ You come to see me again? It's been four years!" She wraps Stiles in a two-armed hug, then pulls back and kisses both his cheeks.

Stiles responds in kind, throwing an arm around her and kissing both of her cheeks, as well. "Josefina! It's good to see you. Good to be back in Campeche, and even better to come to your lovely house."

"Sweet boy, you bring me fruit!" Josefina says, taking the cardboard box from Stiles. "Oh, you try and hide it, but you're just like your father. Good people, the both of you. A little like that Han Solo from the movies, but not bad men!"

Stiles laughs, but his heart rate speeds up. "Thank you, Josefina. I'll be sure and tell Melissa that you said so."

"How is my daughter doing? She still in that awful town?" A conspiratory wink. "She run away with that boy yet?"

"Still as fiery as ever. Dad sent her flowers a few weeks back. She sent them right back to him."

"Mm. Delgado women are stubborn." Josefina looks at the fruit, then looks at Derek. Her gaze turns sharp, assessing, and then she turns back to Stiles and his backpack. "You want into the tunnels, don't you?"

"It's for Scott," Stiles says, quietly. "We think we might have a lead on a cure."

"And so you bring a stranger to my house?"

"He's — a cousin. From Raf's side. Miguel." Stiles's heartbeat stays at the same elevated pace, and Derek wonders if he's been lying since he laughed, or if he's just that good.

Josefina turns that evaluating gaze back on him, but then looks down at the fresh fruit in the cardboard box. She heaves a sigh and turns around, waving over her shoulder with a simple, "Well, come in, then. Anything for my daughter and her son."

* * *

The tunnels start from the wine cellar — which is still stocked with wine; Derek took one look at the bottles near the back and wondered if Stiles had ever stolen one — and go down, deep below sea level. Derek doesn't spend long thinking about how the tunnels haven't flooded. Not because he doesn't care, but because he doesn't want to imagine the dam or airlocks or whatever they are _breaking_ , after lying fallow for four hundred years.

Even a werewolf can drown. He'd just take longer.

The tunnels aren't even slimy or full of rot. They're almost perfectly dry, as if the hot sun on the Peninsula has spent centuries baking the earth and everything under it. They're also short; Derek walks with his shoulders hunched and one hand on the ceiling. Stiles, who's almost his height, has to bend over only a little less. 

Their first setback happens about two hours into the walk, after a steep drop. Derek takes one step, then another, and his left foot lands on air. He immediately reaches out and digs his claws into the walls on either side of him, his heart spinning crazily as he lurches toward an unknown drop. He manages, by main force, not to fall forward, instead inching himself backward until both his feet are on solid ground.

"Shit," Stiles says. "This must have been dislodged by the earthquake last year." He turns the beam of his flashlight on the abyss.

Derek crouches as he looks down, suddenly dizzy as he stares into what looks like unending blackness, lit only by the green-gold glow of Stiles's LED lamp.

Stiles sweeps the lamp up and around, finally finding the tunnel's continuation — down and to the right.

"You've got to be kidding," Derek says.

"Nope. This is my life, now," Stiles says.

"What, you weren't always a thief?" Derek arches his eyebrows. "I figured you'd been running cons since you were a kid."

Stiles snorts a laugh. "Nah, my dad and I were real straight-arrows. Then Mom — well, anyway. We haven't been good men in a while, but we've never been awful, either." He pauses a beat, then says, in a clipped tone, "I think we're going to have to put a hook in the ground and swing, then drop."

"That's insane. There's no way it'll hold us."

Stiles shrugs. "So put a hook in the ground and the wall."

"I weigh two hundred pounds. You're, what, one fifty? It's not going to —"

Stiles turns to him, and his eyes look almost yellowish, thanks to the way Derek's eyes wash out red in low lighting. His expression is intense, and his tone is strung tight when he snaps, "We'll make it hold, Derek."

So Derek uses his claws to dig holes into the wall and ground, and Stiles screws in clamps. He threads a line through the clamps, measures it out by tossing it at the place they'll have to jump to, and then cuts it all with only a little slack.

"This is the craziest thing I've ever done," Derek says. "At least let me go first. If you fuck up, I can catch you."

Stiles looks between Derek and the drop, then sighs and makes a 'be my guest' gesture.

Derek thinks human, thinks broccoli and Bach and ashes and self loathing, anything to keep his claws in, as he grabs the rope. He backs up as far as the rope will allow him, then breaks into a run forward, legs pumping, until the tunnel blurs around him — 

The drop hits — 

Derek tightens his grip on the rope, shifts his weight so he swings to the right — 

Releases his grip on the rope — 

And falls. For an instant, he's weightless and everything is perfect. But then he smacks onto the tunnel ledge, curling his knees in. Unfortunately, the tunnel ledge is tilting down, toward the fall, and Derek finds himself sliding.

The jolt of his heart sends his claws out and he scrapes desperately at the floor, kicking his legs to try and stop himself. But he just keeps sliding backward. He's just a foot from the dropoff when he finally jams his leg against the wall. In his desperation not to go over, the claws on his toes pop, shearing through his hiking boots with no trouble and scraping against the wall.

Derek finally stops sliding.

He lets out a sigh of relief, then carefully scrambles to his feet.

Stiles actually sounds concerned when he shouts, "Derek! You okay?"

"Fine now," Derek says. He looks down at his feet and thinks about calm things until his heartbeat slows. The claws retract.

"Throw the rope back!"

So Derek does.

The second setback happens when Stiles makes the jump. He manages, like Derek, to roll into the tunnel, but like Derek, the incline sends him sliding back into the darkness.

And unlike Derek, Stiles doesn't have claws to slow his momentum. He yelps as he goes down, begging the universe not to let him die in a rush of chanted nonsense.

Derek's heart pounds a furious tattoo in his chest as he throws himself after Stiles. It's not even a conscious decision; he sees Stiles slide backward, just like he did, and he's immediately racing to follow, only half aware of Stiles talking. He grabs one of Stiles's hands in his, digs the claws of his other hand into the wall, higher than the gouges he made before, and cringes at the shrieking noise his claws make.

They're still sliding. Not as quickly, but the fall is inevitable.

Derek closes his eyes and pops the claws on his toes, lets them slice through his boots again, curls his feet so the claws can dig into the ground, all the while trying to keep his left hand human. Can't even let the fur grow; if he lets one thing slip, he'll let it all slip.

The ground whines underneath his feet, but their slide stops. Stiles takes in a heavy, ragged breath, finally, blessedly silent. Derek breathes, too, unwilling to let go of Stiles even as his heart beats away his humanity.

The minute he needed to catch his breath stretches on into two, and three, and Stiles still hasn't said a word. Derek feels his heart slow, feels the human shape surge forward. Shifting back like this — just letting it happen, just letting it wash over him — is easy, painless, like lying in the sand at the beach and letting the waves tug at him.

"You're quiet," Derek says, when he no longer has to lisp around fangs. "Do you have a concussion?"

"Ha, ha," Stiles says. He sucks in another breath, so deep his chest heaves, and then starts shoving at Derek. "Come on. Let's get moving. I can feel air moving on my back, and that is just really not a good sign."

Derek stands. He actually thinks before he grows his claws again. "Let's get the hell away from that dropoff," he says. "And off this incline."

"Yeah," Stiles agrees with a shocky chuckle. "So uh. Mind if I hang on to you? Since you've got some natural handhold makers there."

Derek rolls his eyes, but shrugs. "Suit yourself. If you feel yourself falling, do me a favor and _say_ something before you let go. I'd like to have at least some warning before I try to figure out how to tell your father I let you die."

* * *

The uphill slog is grueling, even with werewolf strength. Derek has to dig every available claw into every available surface, and he still jerks backward once or twice. But eventually the tunnel levels out, going straight, rather than up or down, and Derek drops Stiles, then collapses next to him. The tension leaves every muscle with the ease and suddenness of cutting a puppet's strings.

"Holy shit," Stiles says.

Derek responds with, "I did all the work."

Stiles just claps him on the shoulder, then digs around in the stupid backpack for energy bars and their canteens.

Derek twists the cap off his canteen and throws his head back as he drinks, uncaring of the water that drips down his neck and onto his shirt. He probably stinks of sweat, and he knows he's covered in dust. He reflects on his situation for a minute, just taking stock of how thoroughly his life has become unmoored. He honestly can't imagine doing this for a living.

When his throat feels less dry, he asks, "So, straight arrows? Really?"

"What, are you making fun of what I called us, or do you just not believe we were ever anything but criminals?" Stiles actually laughs.

Derek glares.

"Hell, when I was little, Dad was a cop. Mom was always out for adventure, though." Stiles's expression turns distant for a moment. "She — ugh. It's an old story. Turkish prison. Got sick, bribes didn't go through in time. Dad had a hard time staying put, after that."

"Jesus," Derek says. He tries to imagine it, and though he can easily picture Stilinski in a police uniform, it's harder to imagine him married to a thief. And yet, Stilinski clearly knows how to run a con, and has plenty of shady underworld connections.

Stiles bites into an energy bar and says nothing more about it. Instead, he says, "I think we're about three-quarters of the way there. I'd have to check my journal, but I don't remember there being any steep drops until close to the end of the tunnel."

* * *

They make it through the rest of the tunnel without meeting any other bottomless pits. The entrance from the tunnels to the Mission, however, is its own problem.

"That's not a door," Derek says, staring at a carved stone wall. It looks like limestone, but none of the rest of the tunnel did. In the cutting beams of light Stiles's LED headlamp produces, he can see carvings.

Derek can't even begin to guess how long it took to make. The lines are intricate, a blend of stylized angles and curling whorls. They go from about chest level all the way to the wall's top. He traces a few with his fingers. Thanks to Stiles's light, he can see almost the whole picture, can see how its hard lines and spiralling curves begin to suggest — something. Something vast, and important, but he can't think what.

Stiles sighs. "This is the part we never got past. Didn't know information on the Codex was past there, so we didn't try really hard. Hell, we weren't even really _looking_ for the Codex back then."

Derek has no doubts they would have taken C4 to the fucking wall, if they'd thought the Codex was behind it.

He watches as Stiles pulls a pair of gloves on, trailing his hands over the wall. "Pretty sure this is some kind of puzzle."

"Stand back," Derek tells him, trying to unfocus his gaze, as if that'll make the pattern pop out at him. "Try and spread the light out."

It's like the pattern is easier to see near the bottom, at what would have been eye level, and then it all just turns into sharp lines that lead to the top — feeding into one final whorl that seems spiralling in on itself until nothing is left — 

"The moon," Derek says. "That's the moon at the top." Well, the moon or a ball of yarn. Did the Maya even spin yarn?

"Whoah," Stiles says. "And those shapes in the center? Don't those look kinda like fangs and clawed hands to you?"

"The one on the far right's a partial alpha shift," Derek says. "Far left is full shift."

"Looks more like a small dog," Stiles says, but he subsides when Derek glares at him. "Okay, so, a bunch of — what, of werewolves? Symbols of wolflihood? Both?" 

"All with lines that connect to the moon," Derek says. "Like — what. Chains? Puppet strings?"

"So it's talking about how werewolves are slaves of the moon? Puppets of the moon?"

Derek snorts. "Did the Mayans even have string puppets?"

Stiles is quiet a moment before saying, "No idea, but the Egyptians did. You wouldn't believe how much Egyptian ivory puppets will go for."

Derek's gaze turns back to the twisted hand, the obvious claws, spiralling misshapen and sharp up from each individual finger. He lets his eyes flare, just for a little more light, and sees carved slots. Small holes, just at the tips of the claws. Five of them.

He takes a deep breath, really hopes nothing's found a way to nest in the slots, and unsheaths his claws. He waits a moment before he slides them into the openings. 

"Holy fucking shit, Derek!"

"Shut up," he grunts, closing his eyes and fully extending them. There's something back there, he can _almost_ feel it. Slowly, he adjusts the way he's holding his hand, pressing his fingers and palm flat against the wall.

Beneath his claws, behind the carvings, something _clicks_. He hears a soft, mechanical ticking, and then the grinding of ages-old gears. Somewhere, water crashes through stone tunnels, but in front of him, the wall is shifting.

Slowly, slowly, the snarling face of a beta shifted werewolf, its wide-open mouth and glaring eyes, begins to slide down the wall. 

In its place is more wall. Derek turns to stare at it, then looks down at the mouth and fangs and sighs. Of course they designed it this way. The whole _point_ of this puzzle is that werewolves are slaves to the moon. And what does every slave do, eventually?

But Derek's too tall, even kneeling. This is apparently an understanding of kneeling from a four foot perspective, not a six foot one, and in order to line his eyes up — he is never talking about this moment again in his life, and he will carve Stiles's throat out if Stiles mentions it — he has to go flat to the ground and then carefully push himself up on his arms. Stiles makes a small noise, low in his throat, but Derek ignores him in favor of focusing on the beta shift.

The flash of his eyes reveals dark gems set into the eyes of the carved face. Slowly, as his eyeshine reaches them, they begin to flare a pale blue. There are pearlescent flecks of white, and Derek spares a brief moment for amazement. Alexandrian moonstone in Campeche, Mexico?

Although, if anybody would notice the effect a werewolf's eyeshine can have on certain types of stone, it would be the first werewolves of Mesoamerica, the werewolves who begged Ixchel to walk as men again and won the moon's blessing.

As the carved werewolf's eyes begin to glow back at him, the gears grind again, and this time, the roar of water is furious and close. Derek only has a moment to brace himself before the steady noise passes by somewhere beneath him, and the entire wall sinks into the ground, leaving only a shadowy archway, like an open mouth.

* * *

Past the archway is a dusty set of stone steps that lead up into what must, Derek thinks, be the main Mission. Shelves and altars for candles abound, but what candles he sees have all long burned to smears of wax left plastered to stone.

Stiles reaches for the walkie he'd tucked into his bag. "Should be in range, now," he tells Derek as he twists the knob on it, then presses in the talk button. His voice changes, becomes slightly more clipped as he says, enunciating clearly, "This is Adam Twelve to County Unit Eleven Hundred. Adam Twelve to County Unit Eleven Hundred."

The walkie remains silent.

Derek hears the faint uptick of Stiles's heartbeat. Hears how the breath Stiles draws in shakes.

"This is Adam Twelve to County Unit Eleven Hundred," Stiles says again, like the third time will magically make Stilinski answer him. "Do you copy?"

More silence.

Derek grabs Stiles by the elbow and asks, "If he's here, where would he be?"

"Up," Stiles tells him, voice dried out. "He'd be above us."

Now, how the hell do they find their way to the main part of the Mission? The air all smells equally dusty, and if he listens close he can hear mice burrowing and chewing on things, can hear the rustle of their fur. But Derek closes his eyes and focuses on the small differences in air quality, the faint traces of other humans.

He has to scent with his mouth open, but he eventually finds a staircase that leads up rather than down.

At the top of the staircase is a heavy stone door, with stone hinges. Centuries ago, someone cut handles into it, and Derek digs into the handles and pulls.

The doorway _shrieks_. Someone darts inside, then immediately slaps their palm over Stiles's mouth. Derek can't help the instinctive snarl at the invasion of his space, at the threat to someone under his protection.

But Stilinski raises an eyebrow at him, even as he gestures emphatically at the door.

Derek slams it shut. The noise resounds, bouncing off wood and stone to echo at top volume.

Stilinski winces, then grabs Stiles by the bicep and races as quietly as possible down the stairs, motioning for Derek to follow. Derek doesn't, though; instead, he turns to drag one of the wooden shelves off the wall. His ears ring with the indignant metallic screech of whatever the Spaniards used four hundred years ago to affix the shelves to the stone, but he ignores the pain in his eardrums and props the boards against the door. At the very least, they'll have the clatter to warn them.

He drags two of the altars in front of the doors, too. Anything to slow down pursuit.

"What the hell is going on?" Stiles snaps, when they've gone three flights down and the ruins are dry and cool again, like they've gone back underground.

Stilinski replies, low and urgent, "Deucalion's men are upstairs. We need to find whatever information is here and find it fast."

"Then we should move," Derek says.

After that, it's a tumbling, headlong rush after Stiles and ahead of Stilinski, down even more flights of stairs and then along a gradual downslope. Stiles's LED headlamp casts a blue-white glow over the white-gold halls. The diffused light reveals pitfalls and loose stones, though Derek suspects the humans don't see them as easily; he finds himself reaching back for Stilinski or nudging Stiles to avoid drops and dips, or to move toward the middle and avoid getting winged in the side by exposed beams.

Stiles actually runs _into_ the next puzzle door they encounter. Flat out smacks the side of his head against it with a heavy thud and recoils with a stung noise, his hand flying automatically to the forming bruise. At least he didn't hit face-first, Derek supposes.

"Good job on that one," Stilinski tells Stiles. "It's gonna look like Derek over there punched you in the side of the head."

Derek rolls his eyes, ignoring Stiles's indignant reply, and flicks his own flashlight on, trying to aim and light up most of the wall.

It's not the same puzzle.

This one is actually simpler — three faces: a wolf's, a human's, and a beta's shifted face glare out at them from the wall. Above them, the moon is a carved labyrinth.

Derek flares his eyes at the human face, then at the half-shifted face, and with the sound of water working and gears grinding, a door opens up in the wall. Once Stiles and Stilinski are through, Derek turns and digs his claws into the door. He has to stretch his hands over his head. Once he has the door pulled closer to eye level, Stiles turns back from his father and helps Derek slide the door to the ground.

After that, it's another headlong rush down the slope. The passage begins to curve to the right, and they come to the third puzzle-door.

This one is a thick wall carved only with that labyrinthine moon. Before they reach it, they have to walk past three thick stone columns, each faintly triangular. Derek stares at them, at the carved Spanish words on each face of each column. They've been chiselled in deep, too angular to have been dug with anything but claws.

Stilinski looks at both Derek and Stiles, then back at the columns. "Any ideas?"

Stiles peers at the columns before reaching out, grabbing a word, and pushing at it. It spins slowly around the column before locking into place. Deep within the walls, water moves, but it's not enough. The door doesn't open.

"Yeah, I'm going to guess that this is a word puzzle," Stiles says, sighing.

The column he just adjusted reads _No es sabio tener toda la atención de la luna_. Which... what? Why is it not wise to have the full attention of the moon? Maybe the Hale lineage has a weird relationship to the moon, but he's never heard another werewolf speak of it as anything but theirs. Their protector. Their collective mother.

It's not the moon's fault they become monsters.

Derek leaves Stiles to the other columns and drifts toward the door. There's a breeze moving, very faintly, and if he looks up, he can see some sort of grate. There's an opening there, but it's high up on the thick wall, high enough that a werewolf couldn't reach it without help, and there are thick metal bars.

What the hell?

Derek presses his ear to the wall and hears the soft sound of something clicking against stone. Scrabbling. Claws, maybe? Clawed footsteps? To see if whatever's moving back there is intelligent — it'd be just like Deucalion, if even half of what Laura and Peter have said about him and his pack is true, to have found a way to get a guy ahead of them — Derek taps on the wall.

Behind at least three feet of stone, something growls.

He jerks back from the puzzle as he hears claws scrape against the stone. The thing is snarling now, scratching desperately in some attempt to get through the thick wall and at him.

"Derek?" Stilinski asks, while Stiles frowns at a second column. Oh god, maybe it's his third.

"Stop," Derek croaks. "Stiles, stop working that puzzle —"

But Stiles reaches out and twists two different words into place, and the water pours.

Derek turns to the carved moon and the snarling thing behind it, but the wall hasn't opened. Instead, a section of the passage to the right has receded into the ground, leaving a dark, open maw.

"Derek, you all right?" Stilinski reaches out to press a hand to Derek's shoulder. Derek tenses, but at the touch of warm skin on his, he relaxes.

Derek jerks his head toward the moon. "There's something behind that wall. It's —" 

He doesn't get to finish his sentence. He loses the thread of his thoughts as the growl goes louder, into a snarl that sounds familiar. And then the thing on the other side of the wall lets loose with the unmistakeable sound of a werewolf's battle roar. Dust shakes down from the ceiling, bright motes in the light they brought with them.

"Holy shit," Stiles says, sounding numb. He lunges forward, grabbing at his father's elbow and then Derek's bicep. "Come on. Let's go _away_ from the angry werewolf."

"How do we know we won't end up trapped with him eventually?" Stilinski asks, but Stiles just keeps tugging them toward that dark, open mouth.

There are no more puzzles after that, just a seemingly endless corridor. But as they go, Derek hears the clicking follow them from the other side of the wall. Every now and then, if Derek stops, he hears the strange wolf snarl, and has to fight the urge to snarl back.

They're about fifty yards out from the door they'd just opened when they hear the distinctive boom and crash of somebody punching a hole through solid rock with explosives. The strange werewolf lets out its infuriated battle roar again. This time, somebody roars back, and Derek feels the sweat that had begun to drip on his skin turn his insides cold.

He knows the way that sound presses in on his ears, the way it makes him want to curl away and bare his throat. That's the sound of an alpha who's been disobeyed.

Deucalion himself is here. And where Deucalion goes, Kali and Ennis follow.

Sure enough, there's a slightly higher pitched roar after that, still an angry alpha noise. Just one from a female throat.

"Go," Derek says, shoving at Stiles. "Go, go."

They keep running down the passageway, trying to ignore the growls from behind them, the angry shouts. There are wet noises, ripping noises. Bones crack and crack again.

Eventually there's nowhere else to run. They reach the end of the passage, of the tunnels. This room has to be the _point_ of everything the Mission has been hiding. But it's just a room at the bottom of a set of stairs, with murals on three of its walls. Derek counts twelve big cats — maybe jaguars — and a wolf, and they're all kneeling with their faces raised toward a carved moon.

"Oh my god," Stiles says. "The thirteen hunters cursed by Yum Kaax. It's — it's an actual thing —"

Stilinski tells him, "Freak out later. We need to get whatever we can from here and get the hell out."

So Stiles digs in his backpack. He pulls out some sort of handheld digital thing — it doesn't look much like a camera — and searches the room before finally tripping some sort of lever. Once again, water rushes through the walls — prompting indignant snarling and an agonized scream from somewhere they've left behind — and an altar appears from the floor.

Or maybe a Mayan sarcophagus, judging from the way Stiles and Stilinski lift the top off it. 

Stiles pulls the altar's contents out and takes a series of quick scans with the handheld device. He's only just shoved the documents back in the sarcophagus and, with Stilinski's help, thrown the lid back on when the wet snarling of the fight reaches them. The fighters can't be more than twenty feet outside the room, all running fast, the sound of skin being ripped open too loud, when there's a sick, pained yelp, like an injured dog, and then the snarling stops.

Three new heartbeats enter the room, and Derek turns, placing himself between the Stilinskis and the door.

Deucalion's hair is a whitish blond, the bone blond that sometimes comes with age. He's wearing sunglasses even in this darkness, though a red glow seeps out from behind the black lenses. On one side of him stands a woman, tall and dark haired, with bronzy skin that's still healing from at least half a dozen cuts. The wounds look sore and inflamed, infected already, even though she must have just received them a few minutes ago, but she ignores them utterly, keeps her neck arched in a way that is both proud and protects her throat.

On Deucalion's other side is Ennis. Derek doesn't even think as he peels his upper lip back and open his mouth, then takes a deep breath; it's all pure reflex, an automatic response to the man who attacked his sister. Ennis, too, is bleeding, and his injuries have the too-sweet smell of rot and the tang of infection. Something about him looks different — his torso looks lumpier, maybe, than the last time Derek saw him. 

How did aging, blinded Deucalion escaped that fight unscathed? Is he just that good — Laura had once called him the Alpha of Alphas, though both she and Peter had rolled their eyes — or did he manage to stay back somehow? 

"Stilinskis," Deucalion says. "And a Hale. You're too young to be Peter, so I'm sure Laura would be surprised to see where you stand now, Derek."

Stilinski steps between his son and Derek. His eyes never leave Deucalion's face as he ejects the magazine from his handgun, tucks it into one pocket, and slowly reaches into his other pocket. "Deucalion."

"Hand over the documents, and nobody has to die."

"Oh boy," Stiles cracks. "The old 'nobody has to get hurt' bullshit. Do you actually expect us to —"

Deucalion cuts him off, smooth and disturbingly calm. "Oh, all three of you are going to get hurt. But none of you need _die_."

"It's all still here somewhere," Derek says, and hopes the way his heart has been jackhammering in his chest will hide the twitch of a lie, hopes the way he's been sweating from exertion and actual fear for his life will explain the stink of his sweat now. "We haven't found it yet."

"I find that hard to believe," Deucalion says.

Stiles's hardbeat is hard and fast, but he smells like fury and long-building frustration as he snaps, "Believe what you want. All of these fucking puzzles have been aimed at werewolves, and I think _this_ one's geared toward alphas. Which, in case you hadn't noticed, Derek isn't."

Deucalion turns his head toward Derek again. "Your pack has always had a questionable history," he says, because of course Deucalion would think being friendly or even neutral to humans is questionable, "but now you're preparing to stand with humans against your fellow wolves?"

"What do you want with the Yum Kaax Codex?" Derek asks.

"What do you? For that matter, what do _they_? They're human. What use can they possibly have for it, save trying to sell it and instead kicking off yet another secret war between hunters and werewolves?"

"Which doesn't tell us what _you're_ going to use it for," Stilinski says, and pulls a different magazine from the pocket he'd reached into. It smells sour, bitter, but also strangely green.

Wolfsbane rounds. He's loaded that magazine with wolfsbane — 

Stilinski doesn't pause or hesitate as he slides it home, then pulls the slide back to eject the previous shell casing, chambering a round. His every movement is well-oiled, economical, as he raises the gun and aims.

"Is he pointing a gun at us?" Deucalion asks Ennis, too low for human ears.

"At Kali," Ennis grunts, equally low.

Deucalion just turns his head toward Ennis and arches an eyebrow. Ennis pounces forward, almost too fast for Derek to see.

But Derek doesn't have to see, doesn't have to think. He intercepts the alpha, leaping forward to tackle him to the ground. It's like ramming his entire body into a brick wall, even as he hears Ennis's skull crack against stone. He smells the blood, too sweet, almost rotted, and its iron-copper tang subordinate to the stench of infection.

Ennis practically yowls with pain, and Derek hears something _pop_ beneath the skin. It reminds him, for an instant, of watching his human older brother deal with acne, fingers pressing around the little white growths, squeezing until they burst with that same popping-skin-and-squirting-liquid sound, the same sudden scent in the air of seeping infection, with a touch of blood.

Only this is on a much larger scale. Whatever abscess just cracked or squirted or whatever was much, much larger than any pimple. The scents of blood and pus are thick on the air. He looks down, sees sudden wet patches near Ennis's armpits and thighs.

Derek flings himself away. Whatever infection is defeating an alpha werewolf's healing, he wants nothing to do with it.

Ennis is on his feet only moments later, but he looks dizzy, and his pupils look _wrong_. They've shrunk down to pinpricks. But he still seems able to track Derek's movements, since he follows Derek with his eyes.

Moments later, he charges again. This time, he aims straight for Derek, as if he's forgotten all about the implied order to take down Stilinski. This time, he extends his claws — 

And Derek doesn't move, too caught between horror and fascination by what's happening to Ennis's hands. His fingertips and the skin around his nails have turned red and inflamed, clearly infected with something. But there are little black blisters, and Derek can hear a strange sort of light crack underneath them, like he's cracking his knuckles, even though he isn't.

The sound of the gunshot ricochets around the room, stabbing Derek in the eardrum and forcing him to move. Ennis jerks and then redirects his attention in a choppy, unnatural motion, to Stilinski.

"Enough," Deucalion says, but Ennis is beyond hearing, and behind Deucalion, Kali begins to snarl.

When Kali lunges at the nearest body, Deucalion slips out of her way in a startlingly delicate, bare movement, easily staying out of Ennis's sight.

Stiles's eloquent response to all of this is to shout, "Holy shit!" He's reaching for his gun as he shouts, though, and he's aiming within seconds.

Derek smells something _hot_ , almost sugar-sweet, and then the acrid tang of wolfsbane, and the pressure against his eardrums is maddening. The noise of Stiles's gun going off draws Kali's attention, but Deucalion surges forward and grabs her by the back of her neck. She growls as she twists, trying to swipe at him.

But Deucalion simply reaches over her shoulder, his claws out, and rakes four thick lines across her throat. Her blood is both a fine red mist and a jerky, too-thick stream. Worse, it stinks of sweet rot, and Derek drops to the ground rather than be touched by it.

"You gonna help us get out of here alive?" Stiles demands, choking on either the stench of Kali's blood or a thick, bitter laugh.

Stilinski chambers another round and snaps, "We can all kill each other _later_. Let's get out of here first." He fires at Ennis again, and this time doesn't miss, taking him in the knee.

The knee doesn't heal. Ennis goes down on it with a snarl that turns into a low whine. The black blisters spread, from his fingers up to his arms, growing. They smell — strange. Cold and almost metallic. Like they're filled with some sort of gas. They turn into huge pockets of something dark and crackling within seconds, and even the skin around them turns purple. 

"Holy fucking shit," Stilinski says. "What the hell gives werewolves _gangrene_?"

"Don't know, don't know, holy god, I know you don't want to, I know he's down, but if we don't, Deucalion will," Stiles says in a nonsensical rush. "And then we're fucked."

But Stilinski seems to understand what his son is getting at, because even while Derek is crab-crawling backwards and away from all the blood and pus on the floor, Stilinski raises his gun again. He fires only once, this time, and Ennis topples over backwards. It takes him a full minute and a half to stop breathing, but at least he isn't moving anymore.

Deucalion breathes heavily for a moment before turning in Stilinski's direction. Derek can hear the rapid pound of his heart, the strain and fury of it, and he puts himself once again between the Stilinskis and the Alpha of Alphas. Best not to think about why it seems so _right_ to do that.

"Well. It seems I'm without two of my packmates, and you and your son are surprisingly well-armed." Deucalion offers them a smile, but it's sharp. Knife-edged. "As it is, I'll settle for all of us leaving, now."

"All of us? You don't want to stay and —"

Deep in the Mission, something cries out, long and loud, murderous. It's not the rounded, full-throated sound Derek heard from Deucalion's pack; it's drier, brittle, almost thin, though it's still loud enough, piercing enough, to shake dust from the ceiling. It's not just a battle roar; it's something howling for blood.

"All of us," Deucalion says, grim.

Derek never thought he'd see the day, but he agrees. And as right as it felt to get between the Stilinskis and Deucalion, it feels even more right to pull them into his wake as he makes his way for the stairs.

Just a few feet from the stairs, the thing he'd heard Kali and Ennis fighting lies slumped against the stone wall. Derek can't even call it a body; it looks like it might never have been a real person, human or 'wolf. It's emaciated, nothing but stringy muscle on top of bone, its skin, perhaps brown in another life, desiccated from the heat and dryness, has gone sallow with blood loss. It had hair once, probably dark, but now it's all so matted and filthy that there's no real telling even what color it had been.

It has the same lumpy torso, something grown hard and sour under its arms and along a throat so shredded he can see the clawed spinal column. Its right side is a ruin of torn cloth, purpled skin, and big black bubbles. The entire thing stinks of rot, and it's missing its right leg and its left eye, but the right eye stares endlessly, straight at Derek.

When Stiles's headlamp beam sweeps over it, he sees the pupil dilate, and he hisses and throws an arm out to block the Stilinskis' paths.

But the thing doesn't move beyond the expanding and contracting of its pupil.

"It isn't dead," Deucalion tells them, quietly. "It simply can't heal the paralysis."

They pass it by and ignore the infuriated scream of another somewhere in the Mission.

They can't take quite the same path up as they did down — the puzzles won't open from the inside — but there are doors and stairs, and Derek doesn't hesitate to drag Stiles when he stops to stare at carvings on the walls. Stilinski, at least, stays aware of the fact that they need the hell _out_ of here.

The final flight of stairs is steep and narrow, far too easy to fall backwards from, has nothing to hold onto. Derek reaches out, keeps his grip on both of the Stilinskis. He can all too easily imagine Stiles slipping and falling backwards, sprawled out at the bottom in sickeningly wrong angles. Can all too easily imagine Stilinski's look of horror as he fails to catch his son —

But they make it to the top without anybody tripping, and Derek doesn't mind the feel of Stiles's skin beneath his palm, cooler, compared to Derek's own.

They tumble out into late afternoon sunlight and dry, scorching heat. Even if Derek were human, he could pick up the salt of the sea from here.

Stiles actually collapses onto the sun-baked ground, giving every impression of being bonelessly exhausted. Even Stilinski sinks into a crouch, clearly tired.

Naturally, Deucalion chooses then to strike out at them. Derek hears it coming in the sudden slight uptick of his heartbeat, but it's not enough warning before Deucalion is darting across the golden brown dirt, his claws extended.

Derek barrels into the Alpha of Alphas, slamming his shoulder into Deucalion's chest. But Deucalion just rolls with the impact and lashes out, his claws raking a line of fire down Derek's cheek. The corner of his mouth tingles, and above the scratches, his eye burns.

Derek's brief moment of horror — is that the hand Deucalion killed Kali with? Has he passed whatever infection was in Kali's blood on to Derek? — is all the time Deucalion needs to backhand him into the dirt.

And while Derek is climbing back to his feet, Decualion sails smoothly over to Stiles, who has scrambled up and is reaching for his gun. But Stiles is exhausted, slow. Deucalion reaches him before he can really aim — 

And what he's after is the bag. Stiles's messenger bag, with the wireless scanner. Deucalion knocks the gun out of Stiles' hands, then reaches into the bag and grabs the scanner. The alpha's hand tightens on it, claws whining against the metal and plastic, and the scanner _crumples_ in his grip.

He drops the scanner and reaches back into the bag. In the end, he goes for Stiles's cell phone, his radio, his tablet. Every electronic Stiles brought with him, Deucalion destroys and drops at their feet.

Derek tackles him, of course, but Deucalion just flings him away, and neither Stiles nor Stilinski seems inclined to shoot him over the electronics. Instead, Stilinski just glares, his eyes hard but his heartbeat startlingly calm. Stiles is the nervous one, with his breath coming in short bursts,but Stiles is in close quarters with an unpredictable alpha werewolf.

When Deucalion has destroyed everything they've worked for for the past three days, he simply smiles at them, blind and blithe. "I trust you'll bow out gracefully, now?"

"Gracefully, sure," Stiles says, and for all that he stinks of fear, he doesn't hesitate to step into Deucalion's space and snarl, "Yeah, I'll _bow out_ , you asshole, because I'm not an idiot. But if I ever see your furry ass again, I'm putting wolfsbane bullets in whatever's left of your eyes."

Deucalion's smile turns smug, but he leaves. He even turns his back on them. Derek's not dumb enough to run after him, but he's not sure why Stilinski and Stiles don't just shoot him in the back. And, so long as Deucalion might be in earshot, he doesn't dare ask.

* * *

_Day Three — San Francisco de Campeche_

He finds out regardless when they return to the town. The walk is long and dry, and Derek ends up giving Stilinski his canteen. It's not like Derek needs it more; he can go six days without water, and Laura could go even longer than that.

They see smoke just as the sun sets, stark black against the beautiful fade of red into purple.

They don't connect it until after the sun goes down and they stumble back into Campeche itself. The streetlights are on, and the children have come back out to play, amidst fireflies and adults who drink coffee or hot chocolate and watch them indulgently.

Stilinski is limping by the time they make it to the street of their motel, but he's been refusing for the past hour to let Derek or Stiles carry his weight.

But then their gaze turns to the single fire truck with its lights still flashing, to the sodden and still smoking motel, to the dispossessed owner shrieking and wailing in Spanish.

"That son of a bitch," Stilinski growls.

Stiles agrees with an eloquent, "Holy fucking shitballs. That _asshole_."

"You should have just killed him," Derek says.

"He keeps all the other contenders away by the power of his crazy. And by how much he clearly needs to be beaten with a sack of dicks." Stiles jumps as, somewhere within the motel, something gives way, and part of the structure collapses in on itself with a sad groan and a loud crash.

"Where now?" Derek asks, and he can't help thinking: not just whatever Stiles got with the scanner lost, but now they're down to the clothes on their backs. It galls him, and worse, it makes him half want to give up.

But he promised Laura, and he's not about to give Peter something else to laugh about, and when all is said and done, the rest of the world needs to know about the Codex.

"Parrish," Stiles says, so they turn and head toward the older part of town.

* * *

They end up eating dinner in Jordan Parrish's kitchen, while Parrish drinks coffee and his men wander around the property with nervous heartbeats. And over dinner, Stiles explains.

"Deucalion is actually useful to us. First, he would never have destroyed my equipment if he didn't have the information already, so worst case, we can just keep an eye on his crazy ass." Here, Stiles pauses to take a sip of beer and enter a series of passwords on the laptop they'd left in Parrish's keeping. "Second, he's so crazy that most people have backed out of the search, and he's taken out the rest. It's down to him and us."

"And third," Parrish pipes in, "he didn't actually destroy what you got. I got the upload push on my phone."

Stiles, grinning like an angry monkey, hits enter one last time and then presents the laptop to Derek and Stilinski. And there, on the screen, is a menu full of photographs from the Mission ruins. Stiles flicks through them, and Parrish whistles through his teeth.

"So the thirteen hunters were an original part, not added by the Spaniards," Parrish says. "I always thought it was some sort of Spanish just-so story with a little Yucatán flavor."

"Nope. I mean there are definite Spanish influences — for one, I'm pretty sure the Mission was built to conceal a native holy site — but the Thirteen Hunters are real." 

At Stilinski's questioning look, Derek recites the Spark Notes version: "Thirteen Hunters poached on Yum Kaax's ground, and he cursed them to turn into animals. Ixchel, the moon goddess, took pity on them and gave them the ability to change back."

Stiles nods. "Yeah, right, so why was there a puzzle devoted to the idea that it's not wise to have the full attention of the moon?"

It's not a saying Derek's ever heard. He's even heard particularly old, traditional werewolves refer to the moon as the mother. As a protector of werewolves.

Something in his brain twitches, trying to connect the puzzle and the placement. Derek chews on it on his own for a moment or so, before he adds, "And why did it show up right before we saw one of those…" He runs out of words. There's no describing the pitiful, terrifying creatures, and he's not willing to call them 'things.'

Stilinski shudders. "Christ. Why'd you have to mention those motherfuckers?"

"Ennis was one of them." Stiles says. "And Kali was on her way. Those cuts should have healed before they even walked in."

Derek waits until Stilinski has pushed the last few remaining shreds of his meal away and until Stiles has set his beer down to tell them, "Those lumps? Ennis had one under his armpit. Busted during the fight. Full of pus."

Stilinski, Parrish, and Stiles all go eerily quiet and tense. But it's Stiles who tenses the most. He chews on his lip as he thinks, then taps his finger against his beer bottle.

After a moment, he says, "That sounds like the plague. And those black bubbles were gas gangrene, which is transmitted by a specific bacterium."

Stilinski frowns. "Does somebody maybe want to explain to me why we've got alpha werewolves hosting infections their immune systems should shrug off? Can any of you three explain it?"

"Witchcraft," Stiles says, but gives an ironic smirk, clearly laughing at himself.

Parrish shakes his head. "I don't know. It shouldn't be possible, but we're dealing with Mayan legends and werewolves, so I suggest we throw 'should' out the window."

"Then let's look at what Stiles pulled out of the ruins," Derek says. "It might be nice to find the Codex _sometime_ this year."

Stilinski tosses him an indulgent sort of smile and leans forward. He swipes his finger along the laptop and enlarges the first scanned image.

"Sixteenth century Spanish," Stiles huffs, but they all lean in over the screen, puzzling out words and phrases.

Derek is mostly content to take a back seat and just listen. He's always been interested in werewolf history, but much of their history is myth, stuff not taken seriously by modern academics.

"Holy shit," Stilinski breathes, as they translate another page. "Los Hermanos Del Lobo were real. I always thought that was — I don't know, supernatural propaganda. Werewolf conquistadors. Who'd have thought."

Derek jerks back to attention and runs an eye over the page they're staring at, but he is absolutely shit at understanding the language as it was in the sixteenth century. The calligraphy doesn't make it any easier.

"What's it say?" He demands.

"That the Brothers of the Wolf rescued the Codex from the _Luna Soñolienta_ and took it to Isla Luna," Stiles says. "Or…something like that. It might be stolen rather than rescued."

"Be real nice if we knew what they meant by Isla Luna." At Stiles's eager look, Stilinski adds, even more wrly, " _Besides_ 'Moon Island.'"

"Well, that's what maps and local legends are for," Parrish points out.

Stiles just sweeps through the image gallery, revealing more documents — these looking like cargo or tribute manifests — and a few outdated maps.

"If we're lucky, the coastlines won't have changed much since the fifteen hundreds," Stiles says.

Derek very much doubts they're lucky, but he looks over Stilinski's shoulder, at a tablet the man has produced from apparently nowhere. There are more recent maps on it, both topographical maps of the coastline and more standard nautical maps of this part of the Gulf.

And for once, Stiles is right. The coastline hasn't changed much.

Stilinski looks between his tablet and the laptop, his brows arched. He sighs, and says, "Alright. Parrish, you figure out how to get this mess printed so I can really look at it. Derek, go put some coffee on."

Derek goes, disgruntled at being relegated to the coffee guy, but not willing to argue it yet.

* * *

It takes Stilinski two hours to get a real one-to-one comparison of the coastline and the currents as they were then and as they are now. Within half an hour, he has an island off the coast pinned as a possible Isla Luna.

Stiles takes an hour to get satellite footage and confirm.

By this point, however, it's nearing midnight, and not even food and coffee are keeping them upright.

"We move day after tomorrow, or maybe day after that," Stilinski says after he smothers a yawn. "Tomorrow to rest up, day after to resupply and do prep, and then we'll get an early start."

Derek bristles. "Deucalion could already be moving in on it!"

"Deucalion is crazy," Stiles says. "Even if he finds the Island before us, he's not going to get to the Codex first." He smirks at Derek. "We've got one last ace up our sleeve."

"And do I get to know what that is?"

"No," Stiles tells him. He tilts his head, biting into his lower lip, before he arches his eyebrows. "Got a problem with that?"

"I don't know. Am I just helping you, or are we actually helping each other?" Derek takes just a step forward, into Stiles's personal space.

Stilinski gusts a heavy sigh. "Jesus Christ, you two. There are how many bedrooms in this house, and you have to play your game in the damn hallway? I'm getting some sleep."

He brushes past them. They both watch him go, and when Stiles turns back to look at Derek, there's a low-coiled warmth in his gaze. And yet, for Derek, the moment is broken.

The next two days pass almost exactly as Stilinski said. They rest up and restock, while Stilinski and Parrish call in favor after favor. After that, they formulate plans.

"We're going to have to parachute in," Stiles says, like dropping onto unknown terrain from a thousand feet in the air is a good idea for humans. 

Derek's pretty sure it's not even a good idea for werewolves.

"Can't we go in a boat or something? There's got to be ways we can get ashore."

"There are a few, but Deucalion will have them fortified," Stilinski says. "No, Stiles is right. Best way to get past his defenses is to go over them."

"Once we land, we'll make for that central temple," Stiles says, pointing at a bump on the terrain map. It looks like a hill to Derek, but he's seen how quickly forests reclaim ruins. It probably was a temple, at some point, before the jungle took it back.

"Where's the drop point?" After a moment, Derek adds, "And how the hell do we get out of there?"

"Drop point is here," Stiles says, pointing at a spot on one of the cleaner edges of the island. "And exit strategy is our ace in the hole."

* * *

_Day Six — the Gulf of Mexico_

The fucking parachute doesn't fucking deploy.

Derek yanks once more on the cord with numb fingers. Some of it hadn't unspooled the first time, but now — 

Now, the air screams past his ears, and he hears the rustle and catch of fabric, and his fall slows, jerkily and jolting, like being grabbed by the scruff. Not enough to make him comfortable — he's still hurtling downward, but it's not free-fall. Beneath him, the island grows ever bigger, coming more into focus.

"Make sure you land on your feet," Stiles shouts, though his voice is tinny and small in Derek's ears. Derek hooks his thumbs into the straps and kicks his legs a bit, eyes on the island.

The ground is definitely coming up quickly now. Or at least the jungle is. The tops of those trees are not very far away at — 

Leaves swallow him up to the knees, and then the soles of his feet hit tree branches. The parachute whips and snaps behind him before it settles over his head and behind his back. It's instinct to cut the shoulder straps and drop into the tree. He digs his claws into the bark, then makes his way down, crashing through branches and falling twenty feet at a time.

Stiles is still a good thirty feet up in the air by the time Derek reaches the ground. He rolls his eyes at the "antiquities importer." Then again, at least they landed in a tree and his gun won't be totally useless.

He cranes his neck to watch as Stiles carefully drops about five to ten feet at a time, controlling his fall with a spike and a length of rope. Eventually, Stiles joins him in the underbrush.

"Any sign of anyone?"

"Not yet," Derek says. He pauses to roll his shoulders. His shirt is already sticking to his back. "Sure he's got guards or something around here."

Stiles shakes his head. "Nah. If I know people like him, he'll have a strike team."

"What makes you so sure he hasn't already found it?"

"We'd know," Stiles says, simply. "Plus, my ace will keep him busy."

Derek sighs. He doesn't _like_ trusting to something so flimsy. And yet, for all Stiles is clearly crazy, he's been startlingly competent.

"Then let's make it to the Temple before his 'strike team,'" Derek says, consulting his phone for a moment before setting off northwest.

He can practically _hear_ Stiles rolling his eyes as he follows.

* * *

Stiles was right: they don't encounter any guards as they make their way through the forests.

They encounter something far worse.

It starts with an agonized, infuriated shriek that bounces off the trees and could be coming from anywhere. Somewhere in the jungle, another ruined throat picks it up and continues it, and then a third.

"You have got to be fucking kidding me," Stiles says from behind him.

From somewhere else in the jungle, he hears gunfire and shouting.

"Well, at least we're not the only ones who have to deal with them," Stiles says.

Derek just looks at the canopy above them and wonders, even as he reaches back and pulls Stiles into line with him.

"Keep moving," he says. If they can just keep going, they might make it to the temple without being eaten or infected.

* * *

They move through the jungle in one long, mad rush. Derek loses track of the number of times Stiles gets tangled in underbrush, or Derek wings his shoulder against the thick trunk of a tree. It doesn't matter; all that matters is that they stay ahead of the plague victims.

They almost manage it. The wails of the plague victims, the shouts and gunfire of Deucalion's strike team, follow them through the jungle, bouncing off bark and sliding along leaves. But nobody comes chasing after them.

No, it's once they're out of the thickest growth — away from the oppressive moisture and into open, muggy air that leaves Derek feeling both sticky and exposed — that they encounter their next plague victim. They saw the rise of the hill from the forest, and headed there, only to find a far smaller pyramid than they were expecting. It's maybe ten feet tall, at most fifteen. Certainly not big enough to store much in.

And in front of it, chained to the stones of the clearing in front of the pyramid, they see a plaguebearer.

Derek suspects it might have been female, once, but that's only from the frailty of its shoulders, the way its hips suggest a generous curve. Its hair is a knotted, ratty tangle, torn out on one side, and its features are long gone. It has no nose, no lips, and one of its eyes is a greasy smear along its cheek.

They're fortunate: it doesn't seem to have the strength to break the chain.

On the other hand, it has a makeshift morning star as an extension of each hand, because Derek has no doubts as to its ability to lift the stones.

"Just shoot it," Derek says, touching his hand to the gun holstered on his thigh. Stiles wasn't cruel enough to ask him to pack wolfsbane, so he'd have to finish it with his claws, and he doesn't even want to look at it, never mind touch it. Whoever chained it out here stripped it almost bare, or maybe the outer clothes rotted off before the skin. Either way, the near-nudity and the rot are nauseating.

"She died of exposure," Stiles says. "Look, no bubos, no gangrene."

Derek snaps, "It's dead. Show it some pity."

Stiles, sighing, unholsters his handgun and fires twice into its forehead. It crumples to the primitive open-air altar, or amphitheatre, or whatever the hell this clearing is. They wait in the sudden silence, half expecting a dozen plaguebearers or at least one of Deucalion's minions to appear, but in the bloodbath of the forest, two gunshots go unremarked.

So they forge on. It's easy to avoid Deucalion's patrols — Derek hears their heartbeats and adjusts course, just like on the ship — but the plaguebearers, whose hearts don't work and who generally don't breathe, are harder to detect before it's too late.

But there don't seem to be many on the island. At least, not as many as Derek would have expected. 

"I don't think there's more than twenty or twenty-five, total," Stiles whispers when they sneak through another clearing. There's a sloped pyramid in it, but it's once small, barely fifteen feet. A sort of Mayan cairn, Stiles says: sort of like a stele or a mausoleum. A monument.

"There's thirteen of those on the island," Derek says, remembering the hill-bumps on the map. "One for each hunter?"

He notes an ancient, rusty length of chain. It's been struck, and he thinks he sees claw marks in the metal. He doesn't take the time to investigate.

* * *

Noon has come and gone by the time they make their way to the central temple. The really big one. It's covered in jungle vines, but there's no mistaking that this is the big deal, the main _point_ of the island.

For one, there are thirteen huge statues. Just as in the Mission, he counts twelve big cats and some sort of dog or wolf. They're all facing the temple, their mouths open in soundless roars, easily standing head and shoulders taller than Derek or Stiles.

"Holy shit," Stiles says.

Derek happens to agree, but he still replies, "You really know what to say in moments like these."

"You're an asshole." Stile digs his phone out of his pocket and starts snapping pictures before he makes his way to the pyramid. After he pulls a few vines away, Derek starts seeing a pattern that looks like stairs, and beyond that, a door.

He's going to regret this.

But he unsheathes his claws and cuts through the vines as well, following Stiles into the temple's grand, gorgeous darkness.

* * *

This time, there are no traps, save the temple itself. Derek can hear the plaguebearers in the distance, but the temple is silent.

The temple doesn't need noise, or puzzles running on Alexandrian moonstone and primitive hydraulics. It doesn't even need guardians: it's a damned maze. Derek has no idea where they're going, never mind how the hell they're going to get out of here.

But he follows Stiles and the carved walls nonetheless. He's on an island surrounded by Deucalion's men and werewolves with the bubonic plague. Being lost in an ancient Mayan temple hardly makes his situation worse.

Slowly, though, as they wind through the walls, Derek becomes aware of two things: a distant heartbeat, slow and throbbing like a half-healed cut, and the awful sense of a presence. He feels like someone is _looking_ at him, with intense enough scrutiny to make his hair stand up and his body tense in preparation for a threat, but there's never anybody around except Stiles.

And Stiles has fallen completely in love with all the writing on the walls, the carvings of wolves and men both subjugated by the moon. In the bluish light of his headlamp, the figures seem to writhe as if in torment, or maybe in ecstasy, or maybe Derek's vision is just swimming from paranoia and exposure to ancient temple weirdness.

The heartbeat grows louder as they push deeper into the temple, and that sense of being watched grows stronger.

He's cringing and desperate not to shift, thinking of every relaxing thing, every important thing, every _human_ that he can, when the heartbeat resolves itself into something he recognizes.

Deucalion. The Alpha of Alphas here in this temple, has reached it first. And yet he hasn't left with the Codex.

Derek is almost too focused on his need to stay human, to hold himself together, to see why when the alpha is finally in view.

They step into the deepest part of the pyramid. Stiles's headlamp catches weakly on distant walls, its beam broken and spread out, barely illuminating huge carven figures. Even with the lamp, the darkness around them is inky, oppressive. Like the full weight of the temple is pressing down on them.

In the frail, faltering light, Derek sees a pathway, surrounded by black and the stale smell of an endless drop, which is impossible. It has to be impossible. And at the end of the pathway, in a circle of stained white stone, is a podium, and what can only be Deucalion.

Deucalion hardly looks like himself anymore. His contact with the Codex — or maybe the disease — has left him in the monstrous half-shift only twisted, feral alphas are capable of. But he's not acting feral: instead, he caresses the contents of the podium, murmuring in a blend of English and Spanish. And around him, behind him, the darkness shifts, air whispering against the edges of Derek's ears.

That sense of presence fills him again, makes every hair on his arms and on the back of his neck stand up. It races down along his spine in a prickle of cold, welcome in the thudding, sticky heat, except for the way it makes his heart race and his stomach clench. Slowly, slowly, Derek looks up at the wall behind Deucalion.

Someone carved a face there, but Derek can't bring himself to look at it fully. He sees an eye easily as tall as he is, its iris sunk on the carving, aiming straight down at him. A plump mouth, stretched in a wide smile of welcome.

He can't look at that face and want to stay human. There is no room for humanity beneath the woman's gaze. Only the comfort of obeying his alpha. Of obeying _this_ alpha, the true alpha of alphas.

Ixchel. The moon that loves them. That protects them.

Stiles rests a hand on his arm, and the insistent awareness of the presence recedes a little. "Something's wrong with Deucalion, and I can't see for shit, so we're going to have to Plan Z this gig."

Derek doesn't remeber discussing a Plan Z. Honestly, he's not even sure that there was ever a Plan C.

"You mean we bullshit our way out?" And pray that vast darkness doesn't swallow them for their audacity?

Instead of answering Derek, Stiles steps forward. "Deucalion?"

A head covered in shaggy hair snaps up. Deucalion snarls at them, hackles plainly rising. But his breath carries the oversweet scent of rot, the tang of infection. His mouth, Derek realizes, his lips — he's chewed them bloody. 

Derek throws an arm out, clotheslining Stiles. "Don't go near him."

But Stiles just turns to stare at him, made pale by the blue light and the black around them.

And Derek looks at the podium, at the vast eye focused on them, and thinks back. _It is unwise to have the full attention of the moon._ The plaguebearer right behind that puzzle, ready to tear into anyone who couldn't find the right words.

Not a consequence. A warning.

"The infection started with the Codex," Stiles says, and Derek almost has the pieces put together.

Still. "What?" 

Stiles turns to look at him, but Derek can see the wheels turning, the facts all spooling together, cohering into the truth. His voice rings hollow, when he says, "Thirteen monuments with _chains_ attached. Thirteen statues facing the temple."

"Thirteen hunters who wronged Yum Kaax," Derek finishes, agreeing. "The Brothers of the Wolf — they concealed everything they knew in the Mission because they couldn't destroy it. They couldn't get close enough." 

God, how long and hard must they have worked, to bring Alexandrian moonstone into the Yucatán? How could they have gotten their point across to Bishop De Landa, that this temple simply could not safely be destroyed?

At least, Derek realizes, not then. Now, though, now, they have explosives. Timed detonators.

And Stiles says, almost as quiet as the whispering shadows, "But we can."

He takes his bag off his shoulders and reaches in, pulling out tiny bricks of — it smells a little like plastic, and sugar, and Derek knows exactly what it has to be. C4. Jesus, he's just been carrying that around?

At his horrified look, Stiles says, "I keep the detonators separate, asshole. I'm not a moron. And you never know when you'll need to blow something to hell."

But Deucalion must smell it, too, because he warbles a long, furious howl. It's a call to arms, a battle challenge, and all at once mournful. He charges for Stiles, loping on all fours.

It's easy to drag Stiles out of the way, to push him to the ground and say, "Get the charges set. I'll keep Deucalion busy."

It's a lot less easy to make good on his word. When Deucalion goes after Stiles — the actual threat to the Codex, or maybe he's just tastier smelling — Derek ends up having to claw a chunk out of Deucalion's back.

The alpha turns on him, roaring in pain and anger. Spit flecks out from his teeth, and Derek flinches away. He's not sure what it will take for Deucalion to infect him. Will blood do it? A bite? A scratch?

But Deucalion sees the flinch, and exploits it ruthlessly, darting straight for Derek, snarling so hard he drools. Maybe he's not exploiting a weakness; maybe he's just crazy. There's no telling.

Derek dodges back, but almost loses his footing as he tries to avoid the blank spaces in his vision, where the temple eats the light. Deucalion swipes over his head as Derek goes to the ground to keep his balance, and suddenly the alpha shrieks with pain, high pitched yelps and wails of agony that quiet into whimpers.

The alpha has withdrawn the bloodied stump of an arm from the darkness. There are deep furrows in the flesh left, like the gouges of claws.

And, curling at the shell of Derek's ears, the shadows whisper again.

Derek rolls away from Deucalion, longing for something to kick off of. The Hale pack — back when there was a Hale pack — trained him as an aerial fighter, as someone who could climb trees and walls and pingpong off them, bringing gravity and his own strength to bear on anyone who struck out at them. But this is like a knife fight in a narrow corridor, if the corridor's walls were made out of knives.

In the corner of his eye, he sees Stiles kneel as close to the podium as he dares go, placing charges. After a moment, he thrusts something electronic in the bricks, and then he's running past them, ducking under Deucalion's swiping left arm in a slide worthy of a MLB game. At the doorway, Stiles shouts, "Come on!"

Derek backs away, then turns and runs after him. Stiles takes refuge on the other side of the door, and the minute Derek passes the threshold, he leans in and fires off a few wolfsbane rounds at random. It slows Deucalion enough for them to turn and run further.

"We have an hour to get clear," Stiles pants, and then wedges more plastique into a crevice in a wall. They back away while Stiles winds detcord and then lights it off. A doorway collapses, buying them time, so at least they're not running from Deucalion.

Somewhere near the pyramid, something screams.

He can hear Stiles's heart spike at that, can feel his own heart stutter in his chest.

Do or die time, and Derek doesn't want to die.

If he doesn't count the stretch and burn of his muscles and lungs, the panicked rush out of the temple is easier than the trip down. His body protests at the ill treatment, at taking flight after flight of stairs without pause, and Stiles bitches enough to make it clear he's at least twice as uncomfortable. But at least he doesn't have to wonder about where he's going: the only way to go is up.

They make it to the surface with fifteen minutes to spare. Stiles doesn't even hesitate, just makes a break for the trees. Derek doesn't have the time to try and listen for the movement of infected werewolves. He follows after Stiles, and they crash through underbrush and the lower canopy, cursing every time the jungle catches them up.

And then the temples crumples in on itself. A dozen or more voices wail at once as the sun-bleached stones collapse with a sound like thunder, with the endless noise of an opened abyss, and Derek hears them all. Two wolves can sound like twenty; twenty sound close to two hundred, their howls rising and falling, mournful and final.

And then the last note dies out, and that sense of presence vanishes. He's standing, sweaty and breathless, in a green jungle with a surprisingly beautiful human, and Deucalion is dead. The jungle, though, is alive, and he could swear he hears everything, smells everything, _feels_ the world press in on him, whispering against his skin in a way nothing has since he hit puberty and the shift started getting harder to manage.

The shift. The moon. God, he's helped destroy the Yum Kaax Codex. The thing he wanted to take public, to preserve for werewolves. It's gone. There's a hollow feeling in his stomach that Derek doesn't think he's going to get rid of soon.

Next to him, Stiles pulls his radio out of his bag and says, "Adam Twelve to Thing One. This is Adam Twelve to Thing One. Do you read me?"

"Five by five, Adam Twelve," a male voice says. "Aiden and I are sweeping the north side of the island, but it looks like these weird fuckers all dropped dead already. You need a ride back to the mainland?"

* * *

Their exit plan — whom they meet on the west side of the island — turns out to be a pair of identical twins. They both flash red eyes at Derek, and Derek flashes his eyes right back.

And then one of them tips his head back, chin tilting up and neck slightly exposed, as he says, "I'm Ethan, and behind me is Aiden." 

Derek blinks for a moment, but then realizes they must be deferring to him as an associate of the Stilinskis. "Derek Hale."

The twins look at each other, but shrug off whatever oddity they've picked up on. They lead Derek and Stiles to an inlet, and within it, a speedboat. It looks well-maintained, but it smells _wrong_ , like somebody else's territory, and Derek hesitates to clamber aboard until Ethan directly invites him. But his feet have barely touched the deck before he wishes he'd been crawling into the Stilinskis' piece of shit sea-plane.

Clearly, blowing up the temple of Ixchel knocked a few of his screws loose.

He drags Stiles to the most distant, defensible corner the boat has to offer, and makes sure to keep himself between Stiles and the other two alphas.

Stiles shows him the same indulgence he gave McCall and his scent-marking. He even seems a little amused by it. But thinking about Scott McCall's scent all over Stiles, when now he smells of Derek and sweat, makes Derek's throat close up.

It's not right. And it's not right that he's freaking out over it. Something has gone wrong with him. He's got to pull back.

* * *

_Day Six — San Francisco de Campeche_

Derek gets his things from the room he'd slept in at Parrish's house. He doesn't have much left; a camera, a cell phone, a laptop, the clothes on his back. And yet it's strange to gather it all in a brand new duffel, strange to clasp Parrish's forearm.

"Good to meet you," he tells Parrish, honestly. 

"Good to meet you too," Parrish replies. His heart doesn't miss a beat. "Look me up if you're ever in the Yucatán again."

After that, he grips Stilinski by the arm as well, accepts a fond pat to his back.

"Thanks for keeping my son alive," Stilinski says. "You ever need a favor or something retrieved, you give us a call." With that, he presses a crisp white business card into Derek's shirt pocket.

Of course they have a fucking business card. He doesn't immediately fish it out, though, instead looking across at Stiles.

"Sure you won't rest up a day? We've both taken some serious beatings," Stiles points out.

"Deucalion didn't put a scratch on me," Derek says, all too aware of the blood pulsing under Stiles's skin. "I — I should go. Get back to my alpha. But if you ever need a journalist — well."

Stiles just says, "Yeah." To the west, the sun is setting, and the air smells like salt and seagulls, and the dying light turns his eyes from light brown to an amber color that seems to burn. "If you, uh, if you ever go to California, just leave a message with the Beacon Hills Veterinary Clinic. We'll get it."

Derek's heart squeezes, just as it always does when he hears the name of that town. Something must show on his face, because Stiles looks wrecked right before Derek turns around and walks away.

Maybe Stiles didn't want him to walk away.

He hopes Stiles didn't want him to walk away.

* * *

_One Year Later — Beacon Hills, California_

The vet clinic smells like Scott McCall and every domestic animal known to man. Also piss, but Derek doesn't inspect that smell too closely. He has no idea if it's McCall's, and he doesn't want to know. There are too many rapid heartbeats to pick out the human or were occupants easily, so he does it the human way.

He doesn't know the woman behind the reception desk, so Derek leans against it, gives her his shiniest, fakest smile, and says, "I'm looking for Scott McCall or Stiles Stilinski. They around?"

The woman smiles warmly before she motions to a door on the left side of reception. "They're in the back, sorting some materials for Dr. Deaton. Go on through."

"Thanks," Derek says.

'Sorting things' for Dr. Deaton apparently means 'throwing mountain ash around and laughing like idiots.' Well, Stiles throws the mountain ash around, trapping McCall in progressively weirder positions, and they both laugh at it.

Derek peels the sunglasses off his face and flashes his eyes at them, just to see if it shuts either of them up. Scott at least stops moving, giving Derek a wary stare.

So Derek says, "I heard you needed a journalist."

"Hey, uh," Stiles says, breathless and only a little awkward. He points up, at his own eyes, and says, "Grats on the ding."

"Had it for about a year," Derek admits. "Turns out I blew up a temple with the alpha of alphas inside. You wanna tell me what you're after now?"

"The only sword in Shambhala," Stiles says, easily. He gestures until Derek steps closer to him, then reels him in for a kiss. It's slow, lingering, just a slide of warm, wet mouths and a mingling of breath, and then it's over. "And this time, we're going to have you help this search start to finish. God only knows what Tibet will throw at us that only a werewolf could survive."

"Sounds fair," Derek agrees. "But if I'm going to get shot at, impaled, and nearly fall to my death again, I want something up front."

Stiles kisses him again. This time it goes even slower, and his mouth opens beneath Derek's, plush lips parting for him. Derek slides one hand to cover the back of Stiles's neck and leans in, nipping at Stiles's bottom lip with human teeth, and relishes in the way Stiles gasps and arches into it. Stiles tangles his long fingers in Derek's hair, dragging his mouth across Derek's in a delicious motion. Their tongues touch, just once, and it's like sparks travelling down Derek's spine.

Derek's the one to pull away, fighting back the urge to flash his eyes and flex his claws, to snarl until the other werewolf leaves the room.

"Hazards of the job, but I'm sure we can work something out," Stiles says against him.

Derek agrees, but arches an eyebrow like he doesn't.

**Author's Note:**

> First, some acknowledgements: Innocentsmith, Rhion, Cheloya, and Leviathanmirror all held my hand and listened to me cry at varying points while I wrote this. Mithborien made [beautiful art](http://mithborien.dreamwidth.org/132379.html) — there's more to be seen than just the title, and it's glorious — and was basically just a wonderful person, and you should all go check her stuff out. I couldn't have done this without any of them, and I love them all forever and ever, and you damn well should, too.
> 
> Just a few notes! 
> 
> I've taken some liberties with geography and history, because, well, this is an _Uncharted_ fusion, and that's kind of what _Uncharted_ does. More specifically, nobody's ever actually found the rumored secret passages in Campeche, and even if those existed, they wouldn't be leading to a Mission San Francisco y San Antonio. For one, as far as I know, there is no Mission anywhere named after Saints Francis and Anthony — patron saints of the environment and lost things, respectively, which is kind of ludicrously on point — but I am also unaware of the ruins of any specific Mission in or near Campeche. If you're wondering why I named the Mission after Saint Francis, look no further than the fact that the Fransiscan order held dominion over the Maya in the Yucatan region in general and Campeche in specific.
> 
> You want to talk guns? The Sheriff uses a Glock 22 with .40 S&W ammunition. This should surprise precisely nobody. When Stiles talks about "the right arm of the Free World," he means the FN FAL, which only looks like it has two barrels if you really, really don't know guns. (That second 'barrel'? That's there to reduce recoil, though you'll still take a pounding during automatic fire.)
> 
> Alexandrian moonstone is not a thing — it's me blending the color changing properties of alexandrite with moonstone.


End file.
